Time is recorded by individuals of an organization to keep track of the time they spend on various tasks relating to the organization. This time data facilitates organizations not only to plan their future strategies, but also to ensure early detection of abnormalities and plan mitigative measures. The effective tracking of time is critical to particular professions when compensations and charges are based upon the amount of time expended to provide a service or complete a project. Examples of professions where time keeping is important include attorneys, doctors and the like. Tracking time is also important for allocating project costs and meeting project completion deadlines. The time information recorded by the individuals of an organization is also useful in budgeting for future projects or services. Hence it is not only essential that individuals record time, but also to ensure their accuracy in doing so.
With existing time recording systems, time recording is a painful and tedious process for individuals of any organization. These systems do not allow an individual to record time to a task in real time while performing the task. Thus individuals have to remember their past activities and the time they spent on those tasks in order to record times to those tasks. Thus time data might not be accurate, especially when the data pertains to activities in the not-so-recent past and the granularity or the detail of recorded data might not be enough for a through analysis. Time recording represents an additional overhead for individuals of an organization, since they have to spend time recording time. Increasing the level of detail of recorded time data increases that overhead since individuals end up spending even more time to record their tasks.
The time recording process is an administrative overhead, including sending reminders etc. to individuals to record time spent on an organization's tasks. In addition, the user interfaces of the existing time recording and reporting systems are not very user-friendly.